Exclusive: Microsoft Tie-Up, Network Sale Among RIM Options: Sources (Reuters)
Research In Motion Ltd’s board is under mounting pressure to consider unpalatable options such as selling its network business or forming an alliance with Microsoft Corp after the Blackberry maker again delayed the release of its next-generation smartphones, said three sources familiar with the situation. RIM said the launch of BlackBerry 10 mobile devices has been postponed to early 2013 — more than a year later than initially promised — because the development of its new operating system had “proven to be more time-consuming than anticipated.” CNN Money The company reported a first-quarter loss of $518 million, or 99 cents a share. Overall sales came in at $2.8 billion, down 43 percent from $4.9 billion in the same quarter a year ago and considerably lower than analysts’ expected first-quarter revenue of $3.1 billion. Gizmodo The worse news: It’s now letting 5,000 employees go, on top of the 2,000 cuts that had been previously announced. Wall Street Journal According to interviews with more than a dozen former RIM executives and industry executives who worked closely with the company, it was a blinding confidence in the basic BlackBerry product that was at the root of RIM’s current troubles.

Chrome Arrives on iOS. Will Apple Spoil the Party? (Read Write Web)
While Chrome for iOS is exciting and long overdue for Chrome users who own iPhones and iPads, the excitement is muted somewhat by the fact that Apple won’t allow third-party iOS browsers to be designated as the default. Techcrunch As promised at Thursday’s Google I/O conference, Google launched a version of its Google Drive application on iOS, which offers native support for the service formerly known as Google Docs on both iPhone and iPad. SocialTimes Also revealed, Google+ now has 250 million total accounts and 150 million monthly active users, and apparently more than 50 percent of Google+ users sign in daily. SocialTimes Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that the current batch of Google Glass “explorer editions” will be released to certain parties in 2013, followed by a major launch in 2014. Google Developers Blog In response to many requests from developers and businesses, we’re introducing Google Compute Engine, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that lets you run Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) on the same infrastructure that powers Google. ZDNet However, Google Compute Engine, which is in a “limited preview,” lacks the depth and options provided by Amazon Web Services. Gizmodo Nobody’s faulting Google’s ambition, or questioning its motives. But we have to wonder: Are these new things meant for regular people, or the data-obsessed, grace-deficient Silicon Valley nerd vanguard?

Twitter’s Mobile Ads Begin to Click (Wall Street Journal)
On most days, Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile gadgets, rather than from ads on Twitter.com, company executives said. One key reason: People who see a Twitter ad on their phones are more likely to click or interact with it in some way, which is how Twitter gets paid for advertisements. Silicon Alley Insider The restaurant chain PF Chang spent $25,000 targeting offer ads at Twitter users who searched for “Chinese New Year” and other terms. More than 1 million users clicked on the ads, retweeted them, or interacted with them in some way. And 70 percent of those who interacted were mobile users.

Tumblr Introduces Pinned Posts [PICS] (Mashable)
Tumblr introduced a new ad product Thursday — one that enables users to pin their posts to the top of their followers’ dashboards for 24 hours, thereby giving their content more exposure. This is the fourth ad product Tumblr has rolled out since the beginning of the year. Royal Pingdom Pinterest in all likelihood is now getting more traffic than Tumblr in the United States. And if it isn’t, it soon will. How did we come to this conclusion? We hit as many data sources as we possibly could and made a highly educated guess, and just so you don’t think we are making this up, we’ll take you through the process.

Courting Brands and Developers, foursquare Unveils Connected Apps Platform
(All Things D)
Continuing its push toward becoming a social discovery engine for local places of interest, foursquare announced on Thursday a developer preview of its connected apps platform. The move essentially allows third-party apps to offer suggestions based on user check-ins; Foodspotting, for example, suggests dishes to order at restaurants, while Path and Instagram integrate better photo sharing. foursquare Whatever you build, anyone in foursquare’s 20,000,000-strong community can connect it to their account and see your messages in their post-check-in screens. We’ll attribute all your app’s contributions, so other people can connect your app or click through to your site. The Next Web Yahoo has announced that it will close down its one-time foursquare competitor, Koprol, at the end of August, less than two and a half years after it bought the Indonesia-headquartered social network for an undisclosed sum.

Facebook testing ‘Want’ button plugin (Inside Facebook)
Facebook appears to be testing a new “Want” button plugin similar to its popular Like button. Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep discovered that a Want button has been added to the Facebook Javascript SDK as an XFBML tag. The button is not publicly listed among the other social plugins on Facebook’s developer site. Waddington says the button will only work on Open Graph objects marked as “products.” AllFacebook Facebook users can organize all of their likes related to movies, television, books, music and restaurants into one handy timeline box following new Facebook integration features launched Thursday by “smart notebook application” Springpad. BBC The BBC has begun streaming live sporting events on Facebook, the biggest tie-up to date between the social-networking site and an international broadcaster.

Scientists Develop Spray-On Battery (Reuters)
Traditional lithium-ion batteries power most portable electronics. They are already pretty compact but limited to rectangular or cylindrical blocks. Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have come up with a technique to break down each element of the traditional battery and incorporate it into a liquid that can be spray-painted in layers on virtually any surface.

Here’s How Much Your LinkedIn Data Is Worth (Silicon Alley Insider)
Capstone analyst Rory Maher thinks LinkedIn stock would be worth an extra $5 per share if the company were to package its “growing database of employee and professional information” and sell it in the form of new products. So how much is your LinkedIn data worth?

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